Community engagement in planning and decision making – for example a consultation about public transport options or planning for the constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Butteriss 1 suggests that community engagement is both a process (how we do things e.g., ensuring that communities have a say in decision making) and an outcome (what we want to achieve e.g., community building or involving parents in a school). In planning and decision making, community engagement is largely used as a process, but in community development and service delivery, community engagement is often both a process and an outcome.

Vertical community engagement is where organisations like government agencies, local councils, schools, businesses, health, community services or whatever, want to engage community members in planning and decisions, want to increase access to their services or want to involve communities in some other aspect of their work.

Horizontal community engagement is where people are engaged in their local community as active community members. While this often happens as a result of community interactions without the involvement of any formal initiatives, at times organisations or programs work to increase community connection. For example an important component of community building and community development is often building connections between community members and there can be health and educational benefits with increased social capital.

In this post I’m focusing mainly on vertical community engagement.

Although I don’t want to get too hung up on definitions it is worth considering “community” and “community engagement”. Unfortunately it’s quite hard to define both of these terms.

Ife 3 (and many others) argue that the definition of community is “highly problematic and contested” (p. 112) in that it is used in many different ways to mean many different things.

As an example of the problem with defining community, Shaffer and Anundsen in 4 provide the following definition:

A community is a dynamic whole that emerges when a group of people:
• Participate in common practices
• Depend on one another
• Make decisions together
• Identify themselves as part of something larger than the sum of the individual relationship
• Commit themselves for the long term to their own, one another’s and the group’s well-being. (p. 246)

Notice it is quite an idealistic vision of what we want communities to be. In reality there can be real divisions and power struggles within communities and it’s important we recognise that communities are not always harmonious and supportive of all members.

The important thing to recognise is that generally communities:

Are on a human scale (rather than larger, impersonal scales such as a whole nation).

Involve some form of association or connection, which may include a sense of identify and belonging. The connection can be geographic (e.g., a town or neighbourhood), affiliation (e.g., a school community), special interest (e.g., skateboarders) or online (e.g., online discussion groups).

Include some form of boundaries. At times the boundaries can be quite blurred. For example if we think of a school community, there would be little debate that it includes students, their parents and teachers, but it could also include some grandparents, some residents living near the school, some local businesses with an interest in the school and various other stakeholders. Even if the boundaries of a community can be easily defined (e.g., people living in a certain neighbourhood), there can be people within that “community” (e.g., who live in the neighbourhood), who feel very much part of the community and those who feel quite excluded. As Moore and his colleagues5 suggest, what matters most are people’s perceptions of what communities they belong to, rather than some other objective measure.

Community engagement is also difficult to define. Many definitions of community engagement focus on vertical community engagement, particularly in relation to planning and decision making. The following are two useful examples of such definitions.

• By which the aspirations, concerns, needs and values of citizens and communities are incorporated at all levels and in all sectors in policy development, planning, decision – making, service delivery and assessment; and• By which governments and other business and civil society organisations involve citizens, clients, communities and other stakeholders in these processes.

Notice the emphasis on community engagement being a two way process. We aren’t taking about one-way communication.

A planned process with the specific purpose of working with identified groups of people, whether they are connected by geographic location, special interest or affiliation, to address issues affecting their well-being. Linking the term ‘community’ to ‘engagement’ serves to broaden the scope, shifting the focus from the individual to the collective, with associated implications for inclusiveness, to ensure consideration is given to the diversity that exists within any community (p. 10).

There are three things I want to emphasise in this definition. First, the focus is on the well-being of the community, not the interests of the organisation. Second, it recognises that community can be defined in a number of ways. Third, it recognises that by linking community and engagement it broadens the scope of what we’re talking about by shifting our focus away from the individual to the communal.

Neither of these definitions, however, are widely accepted as being the best definition of community engagement, because there is no broad agreement.

Community engagement generally focuses on engaging communities or groups of people, not just individuals. While engaging individuals without a focus on their community is important, it is generally not community engagement. The line can be fairly blurred at times – for example school trying to engage its students in the classroom is probably not an example of community engagement. But if a school is trying to engage students from a particular community (e.g., students from refugee families) and involving the community in the process, then it probably would be considered a form of community engagement.

What helps create confusion is that community engagement still involves engaging individuals. The difference is that in community engagement we are paying particularly attention to the role of individuals in their community and the role of community in the lives of individuals.

There are not as many definition of community engagement in the context of horizontal community engagement. In this context we are talking about community members being connected with other people within the community and being engaged in their community (e.g., through sports teams).

To make definitions more difficult, as Butteriss1 suggests, different people use the same term in different ways. For example, Chanan and Miller 8 define community involvement as “the involvement of local residents in local governance, public services and development” and suggest that community engagement is a “narrower term usually meaning the engagement of residents in a particular public service or initiative” (p. 13, emphasis added). I would include their definition of community involvement as a form of community engagement.

In teaching community engagement to university students I emphasise three things. First, my approach to community engagement is built on the belief that communities have many strengths and resources. My experience suggests that communities have many strengths and resources which we can draw on in our work and which we can build on when we’re working with communities. One of the things we can learn from strengths-based approaches to community engagement is the importance of horizontal community engagement and community-led initiatives which are not instigated externally by government agencies, non-government organisations or other external organisations. As professionals from external organisations we can recognise the importance of these types of initiatives, we can provide support where appropriate and we can help foster conditions which make such community-led action more likely (e.g., help build social capital).

Second, community engagement is a two-way process. We aren’t talking about one-way communication. The focus of community engagement is not just about getting our message out to the community. It is not just marketing or public relations. I argue that community engagement is a two-way process where the community impacts on the work we do as well as us having an impact on the community.

Moore, T., McDonald, M., McHugh-Dillon, H., & West, S. (2016). Community engagement: A key strategy for improving outcomes for australian families (child family community australia paper no. 39). Melbourne: Australian Institute of Family Studies. Available from https://aifs.gov.au/cfca/sites/default/files/cfca39-community-engagement.pdf [May not be available in some countries.]

3 Responses to An introduction to community engagement

Hi there,
I’m interested as to why your paper excludes the entire area of what we termed in the 70s/80’s/90’s “self-help”.
Community engagement and community development often bubbles up from within communities themselves and at their insistence! The process is not always “top down”. It’s where NGOs are formed, as well as campaign and action groups e.g. residents groups; women’s groups (for example, Women’s Electoral Lobby); housing, food, worker co-operatives and so on, to ensure that community voices are heard, when “the powers that be” neglect their areas of interest and concern. They’re an important area of community engagement and they personify successful community development.

I picked up a typo:
Point 3. Last sentence “objective (not object) measure”

Thanks Elizabeth,
You make a very good point and I will probably update this before too long to reflect it. I adapted it from something I wrote specifically for students where I had made it clearer that I was speaking about community engagement be organisations. I need to make it clearer that this is what I’m focusing on, but even so it is worth acknowledging that there is other forms of community engagement as well.
While it is partly addressed in horizontal community engagement, it is more than that. I probably need to go back to something I wrote in 2012 (https://sustainingcommunity.wordpress.com/2012/04/07/types-of-community-engagement/) where I did some thinking about this.
I find there is a continual challenge between simplifying concepts and ideas to make them easier to cover in a short course, and over simplifying things (https://sustainingcommunity.wordpress.com/2016/07/25/community-engagement-boxes/)
Thanks for pointing out the typo too!
Graeme

Can a community be the whole universe? From my understanding of your blog and what learned from reading, it seems that communities can sometimes bee discriminatory. I have hear some people makes statement like” we do not want these people to take over our community”. As a social worker, I think we should start looking at community with a different lens. I am not against individuals working together for their community which is from point A to point B, my concerns is our that plays out among some community that think they are superior to other community. Please help clarify my concern.

Welcome to Sustaining Community

Families, community engagement and environmental sustainability – for parents, students, practitioners and anyone who wants to make a difference. By Graeme Stuart from the Family Action Centre at the University of Newcastle. The views are my own.